By Bissong Agbor
The news of the Etung-born senator representing the Central Senatorial District of Cross River State boasting that the votes of the Efiks no longer count in the electoral scheme of things came to me in two dimensions- shock and consternation.
Shock in the sense that if the comment attributed to him holds true or is anything to go by, then Owan Enoh, who has enjoyed an unbroken chain in elective offices for close to two decades, is turning out to be like a man whose palm kernel was broken for him by benevolent spirit and rather than imbibe a lesson in humility, chose to be like Aneke the bird, who after eating to his fill, decided to challenge his Chi.
I am on the one hand filled with consternation that alas, the senator’s suicidal comment may have sounded a death knell or for want of a better phrase, driven the ultimate nail down his political coffin and signaling a sad end to a rambunctious era.
Typical of the bird in Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart, Owan Enoh has definitely eaten to his fill and is about challenging the very system that ensured his well-choreographed passage into the senate in 2015.
The story of his emergence and subsequent election into the senate is well documented. That the then sitting senator and leader of the Senate, Victor Ndoma-Egba had had to find himself on the other side of the aisle today was not owed to defeat, but largely to his perceived treatment by the state chapter of the PDP and its leadership, which assiduously worked for Owan Enoh to become senator.
But how is that gesture being appreciated today by Owan Enoh, other than spitting in the face of the same statesman and former Governor Liyel Imoke, who made it his duty to see him become senator. He is equally poking his fingers at the Northern Senatorial Zone of the state who for the first time was allowed the opportunity to produce a governor in the person of Governor Ben Ayade. Nonetheless, Owan is spitting at the Effik people who have always, always stood by the Central to produce former Governor Clement Ebri and later Liyel Imoke.
No doubt, attempting to short-circuit or alter the power rotation dynamics made possible by Senator Imoke’s political sagacity, through an unbridled, brazen and inordinate ambition, is no less tantamount to spitting in his face and those of the people of the North, given that both Senator Imoke and Owan Enoh hail from the same Central Senatorial District.
A lot of people have described Owan Enoh’s reckless governorship adventurism as a byproduct of greed occasioned by conceit and an exaggerated opinion of self. Nothing could be more true in the light of his effusive boast of not needing the votes of the Effiks.
His ambition even when knowing full well that his Central zone had just handed the baton to the North, which was having a short at the plum office for the first time in the history of the state is totally impish and self-seeking.
With the Tower of Babel or better still, Fuji House of Commotion, which the Cross River State APC is now likened to, Owan Enoh is already experiencing diminishing returns in his flagging political vocation or nearing a cul de sac in his struggle to stay relevant politically.
Ambition, according to legendary playwright, Williams Shakespeare, should be made of a sterner stuff, but for Owan, his is definitely of the crudest, vile and despicable stuff. He is trying to put a knife to what has for long held together the North and the Central- the Atam Spirit. How far he goes in this self-destruct project of his, only time will tell. But as in wanting to turn back the hands of time, time itself is a healer, and it will surely tarry to heal the injustice the cocky senator is trying to wrought on the North.
Agbor, a public affairs analyst lives in Calabar
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